@jalcine @braindouche I'm happy to be wrong & reframe my analysis around any theory that makes more sense of the senseless waste I've observed. Maybe @braindouche is on the right track! Will think more on this.
Appreciate thoughtful engagement.
@slightlyoff @jalcine @braindouche
Continue to feel a lot of this was due to (mostly men) who wanted to distance themselves from the girly stench of HTML and CSS via "real" programming.
I suppose they at least succeeded in inflating FE salaries as a result. Arguably a win.
The bizarre 2-4 year period where that crowd absolutely obsessed over purity and monads in their JS code only underlines my thinks there... FP is as "hardcore" as it gets to a certain personality type.
@betsythemuffin
To an extent, yes absolutely, but also I personally think that prejudice is secondary to the sheer scale of the recruitment problem that web 2.0 presented. That recruitment problem was solved, by and large, by making front end development work a lot more like back end development, specifically java. Which is a wildly simplified way to describe it, but that's what happened.
@slightlyoff @jalcine
@slightlyoff @braindouche In Amsterdam we have this weird combination of a single company that does JS consultancy, JS recruitment (their origin) and conference organization at once, all for “the community”. Complicating and inflating things must really pay off on all sides for them. Some evidence was collected over at https://twitter.com/RecruitersConf
@braindouche @slightlyoff @jalcine
Hmm. I don't actually think prejudice qua prejudice was a significant factor in the re-gendering of frontend.
I think the gendering of frontend as femme enabled the fundamental *contempt* for HTML/CSS best practices that underlay and powered the frameworkification of frontend.
@betsythemuffin @braindouche @slightlyoff @jalcine and I think that (gendered) contempt for simple HTML/CSS is load-bearing in understanding just how/why folks were so willing to accept *complete bullshit* from framework promoters.
@betsythemuffin @braindouche @jalcine I'm angry about it because I know what the JS-sligners got paid, for worse results, after they convinced these companies to "manage out" people who actually knew how browsers worked.
@slightlyoff @braindouche @jalcine let’s just say there’s a reason I actively rebranded myself as a full-stack Rails dev when I started to see the winds blow a way.
Good friend, much better HTML/CSS dev than me, stuck with it as a strict specialization. Our relative salary trajectories are instructive.
@betsythemuffin @braindouche @jalcine Sadly. Frustratingly. Unjustly.
@betsythemuffin @braindouche @jalcine BTW, I'm a "markets when they work" sort of chap, and I'll accept a lot of slop around the edges, but if the point of markets is efficient allocation of capital and, you know, they stop doing that...well, we need to talk about it.
@slightlyoff
When I started my web development career 8 million years ago in the days before jQuery, my first big superhero consultant move was to swing in and delete all your JavaScript, because it didn't do anything useful and was ALWAYS BROKEN, and I made a lot of money doing this. Ironically, somehow, deleting your JavaScript is still how I make myself look good to this day.
@betsythemuffin @jalcine
@braindouche @betsythemuffin @slightlyoff @jalcine This lines up with what I've seen, if you're in engineering leadership and you can show you need many microservices with many microfrontends you must need many people, and headcount (especially in the last few years) is the metric by which engineering leadership shows value. Easier to adjust scale and change resourcing when they're two separate skills too.
@braindouche @betsythemuffin @jalcine Deeply appreciate these trip reports. It's hard to see outside the windows of your own vehicle, let alone traffic pattens. Every honest addition helps folks trying to repair what's broken in putting the weld in right place.